What to Consider When Choosing a Cloud Provider: Our Guide

Choosing a cloud provider to host your cloud environment can be challenging. It’s not that there are too many providers to choose from. It’s more that most people don’t know exactly what to look for or what to consider when choosing a cloud provider. This guide can help you make the choice.

Offers a Favorable Service-Level Agreement

A service-level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between your business and your cloud provider a.k.a. cloud service provider (CSP) that stipulates, among other things:

Guaranteed minimum levels of service for performance, availability, processing time, and other service-level objectives (SLOs) for a particular service, e.g., 99.99% monthly uptime.

Corresponding penalties (often in the form of service credits) if certain provisions in the SLA are breached.
Exclusions or situations when the guarantees may not apply.

Usually, these are the main parts of an SLA. However, as they say, the devil is in the details. How favorable an SLA is to your organization depends on your risk appetite and business requirements. Thus, you need to study each cloud provider’s SLA thoroughly before choosing the best fit. Since some of the key provisions in an SLA have to do with performance and availability, you should consult with your technical/IT staff to understand real-world scenarios.

Note that each cloud service, even from the same CSP, will have its own SLA. For example, in Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2 (compute service by AWS), and S3 (storage service by AWS) have separate SLAs. So, when comparing SLAs of different cloud providers, make sure you’re comparing SLAs of similar services.

Some CSPs might allow you to negotiate a more customized SLA covering other aspects such as security, governance, compliance, retention policies, data portability, etc., so feel free to ask. If the SLAs of competing providers are practically the same, the option to add customized provisions can be a deciding factor. Generally speaking, the smaller CSPs are more willing to craft a customized SLA for you.

Provides Different Cloud Services

Broadly speaking, there are three types of cloud services: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). With IaaS, you rent virtual servers (in the form of virtual machines), storage, networks, and other virtualized components of an IT infrastructure. With PaaS, you rent an environment for software development, testing, and deployment. And with SaaS, you rent ready-to-use, installation-free software applications.

These days, most businesses consume more than one type of cloud service. For example, your organization might be running virtual servers on AWS (an IaaS) and using Office 365 (a SaaS) for your documents and spreadsheets. And if you build business applications on your own, you might be using Google App Engine.

In 2021, organizations used an average of 110 SaaS applications—up from 80 in 2020 and only 16 in 2017. While that’s just SaaS, it gives you a hint on just how diverse cloud adoption has grown in business environments. The number and variety of cloud services you consume will increase eventually. So, in picking a cloud provider, look for one that already has a wide selection of cloud services.

Is Compliant and Secure

With businesses migrating more and more data and processes to the cloud, cybercriminals have likewise developed a growing interest in cloud environments. Already, the massive shift to remote work and cloud usage in 2020 saw a surge in attacks against cloud-based users. As if cyber threats were not enough, several businesses also face added pressure from compliance mandates and industry standards such as:

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI –DSS)
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST)
National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF)
Systems and Organizations Controls (SOC) 2
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001:2013

Cloud providers typically adopt a shared security model where they (the provider) are responsible for the security of the cloud (i.e., securing the datacenter(s), physical servers, physical networks, hypervisors, etc.), while the customer is given the responsibility of security in the cloud (i.e., securing their VMs, applications, operating systems, files, etc.).

Therefore you must know what specific security functions are included in the provider’s part of the shared security model. Some of the larger CSPs are already compliant with certain regulatory requirements. Since these are qualities that you can inherit, find out which security frameworks each provider is compliant with. CSPs that have some compliance baked in can reduce the scope of your compliance responsibilities significantly.

Lastly, some CSPs also offer services that enable you to fulfill your part of the shared security model. For example, some CSPs offer data-at-rest encryption as an option to their cloud storage service. Services like this can further simplify your security and compliance obligations.

Choosing Cloud Provider that has Backup and Disaster Recovery Plans

Despite the seemingly impregnable façade of cloud infrastructures, a cloud provider is really just made up of datacenters. So, yes, since datacenters can be inundated by catastrophic events, such events can also impact the overall cloud infrastructure. It’s therefore important to determine whether a cloud provider has any backup and disaster recovery (DR) plans in place, should such an event occur.

This is one of the major advantages of large public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Their cloud storage solutions are architected to store copies of data across multiple facilities. These facilities are typically many miles apart, so if one facility is incapacitated by a catastrophic event, other copies of your data will still be safe and accessible. Some smaller CSPs also have this capability, so try to find out if the CSPs in your shortlist do have it.

Some CSPs provide multiple options for their disaster recovery offerings, which vary typically according to recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). We won’t be discussing these objectives here but, basically, shorter RTOs/RPOs (measured in minutes or in real-time) are for mission-critical use cases, while longer RTOs/RPOs (measured in hours) are for lower priority use cases. If you have varying DR needs, you’ll need to choose a cloud provider that provides multiple DR options that align with those needs.

Adapts to Your Infrastructure Requirements Easily

Your business needs, as far as your cloud infrastructure is concerned, can change with time. Five or ten years from now, the number of VMs you consume might increase, say, a hundredfold. Or you might have expanded operations to another continent and require a regional presence from your cloud provider there.

It might be difficult to predict what your business might look like five to ten years from now. But if you want to scale easily if and when that time comes, it’s important to choose a cloud provider that already has that capability now.

Again, this is where major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP have an edge. Not only do they already have the capability to allow you to scale as much you want but also they have the global presence to accommodate expansions you might have in other countries. Note that their regional presence is not the same, so check first whether they have a presence in countries where you will likely expand.

Choosing Cloud Provider: Parallels RAS Supports Multiple Cloud Service Providers

Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) is an all-in-one virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution that simplifies the delivery of virtual applications and desktops anytime, anywhere, and to any device. One of the great things about Parallels RAS is its flexible deployment capabilities.

Parallels RAS can be deployed on all major public clouds (AWS, Azure, and GCP) as well as on hyperconverged infrastructures and in on-premises datacenters. This is crucial because, in the real world, many businesses don’t just subscribe to a single cloud provider. According to this report, 92% of enterprises already have a multi-cloud strategy. Should you choose to adopt a multi-cloud strategy for your VDI environment, Parallels RAS can meet that need easily.

Built on a simplified architecture, Parallels RAS eliminates the complexity commonly associated with VDI environments. This results in a low total cost of ownership (TCO) and a faster time-to-market.

Discover a VDI solution that can be deployed easily on any cloud!

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